What Really Caused the Explosion in Bruno?

What really happened in Bruno? I decided to do a little research and came across some very interesting things!

This news spot reports a meteor sighting the same day of the fire in Bruno California.



Link
www.youtube.com...



1:00 minutes into the video, one Eyewitness account says that he heard a giant roar, like a jet, then the biggest boom ever heard in his life



Link
www.youtube.com...



Officials suspect something crashed but all planes are accounted for



Link
www.youtube.com...



The Bruno fire out, this Arial footage reveals a crater at 2 minutes and 8 seconds into the video lasting 50 seconds, and then again at 4:18 into the video. The crater is an elongated, as though something ploughed into the ground at a shallow angle of decent. If it were an underground explosion as caused by a ruptured gas line, the crater would be different, it would be round with a center because there is no rock around it to deflect the blast? No reported faults or fishers in the ground in the area. How did the line rupture to begin with?



www.youtube.com...


Any thoughts?

i can say this op when i watched the new they said they complained to the gas company about smelling gas 3 wks ago wtf den dis happens smells fishy to me

I don't think it was a meteorite.
The jet-like roar heard just before the explosion could have been caused by gas escaping from the broken main. I've never been that close to a major gas main break, but I have heard gas leaking from a cracked feed line on a liquid propane tank. Comparing the sound to a jet engine isn't unreasonable.

As for the elongated shape of the crater, escaping gas would have to build up before causing an explosion, and the only area in which it could build up around a buried pipe would be in the pipe trench itself. That would mean that the explosion, when it came, wouldn't be a 'point source' blast like a bomb, but a linear source, oriented along the length of the gas main, producing a crater with a distinct orientation to it.

If the blast were caused by a meteorite impact, why would anyone hide the fact? It's not as though the existence of meteorites has ever been concealed from the public, and the pipeline's owner has a distinct financial motivation to make a meteorite impact public ASAP. After all, if the pipeline blew because of shoddy maintenance or old age, the lawsuits are going to be huge...but if they can show this to be an "act of God", they can at least avoid punitive damages.

This post, is it an attempt to start another conspiracy theory?
Since 9/11 every disaster is the USA is perceived by a lot of people to be something else than what it actually is.

reply to post by Lupin

I tend to see the fireball video as a coincidence, for a couple of reasons. The video discusses a fireball seen at 5AM on September 10th and the San Bruno explosion occurred around 6:00PM on September 9th. There are many meteors that fall to the Earth every day.

Several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth's atmosphere each day. The vast majority of these, however, occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, and a good many are masked by daylight. Those that occur at night also stand little chance of being detected due to the relatively low numbers of persons out to notice them.

American Meteor Society

For example, the fireball log for September 1 - 7, 2010 has 47 reported fireballs with all occurring in the US except for 1. There are over 1500 reported sightings for the year so far.
AMS

The sound of a jet and the sound of a gas being released from a high pressure pipe sound very familiar. Here's an audio clip I made to show my point. Both sounds are presented here, there are no tricks. In between the 2 sound clips is a palette cleanser for your ears and I edited them as follows. I trimmed the clips, added fades to the beginning and end of both clips, adjusted the volume to similar levels and removed the engine whine from the appropriate clip via an EQ adjustment.

Fire and plane sound comparison

The thought that the crater should be round is a bit of a misapplied thought in my opinion. If you have something where the force, or projectile, from beneath is perpendicular to the ground, one should expect a round crater such as that from an underground nuclear blast or even most volcano craters. Much like your thought that the crater was created by a shallow angle of descent because of the elongated shape, a circular shaped crater could also occur from an impact at or near perpendicular to the ground. Having said all that, remember that the pressure from the gas line was still flowing, thus producing the elongated shape.


Gas Pipeline Blowout Photos

The natural gas pipeline explosion below did not occur as a result of digging but because of corrosion. The explosion occurred Sept 14th, 2008 near Appomattox Virginia on a natural gas transmission line owned by Williams Energy

Here are two of many pictures of similar elongated craters from gas line explosions. There's more photos at the above link from this incident..






Speculation as to what caused the rupture are many and included corrosion, faulty repair, poor maintenance or even a digging operation. I pulled much of my information here from another thread discussing the same question. You may want to also check that thread out as there's a lot more information there.

Was San Bruno "natural gas explosion" a meteorite?